Major websites restored after global CDN provider Fastly crashes

A number of high-profile websites including the BBC, the New York Times, Reddit, The Sydney Morning Herald and Twitch went offline on Tuesday evening during a mass web outage.

The outage was connected to a San Francisco-based website service provider named Fastly and lasted for about an hour.

At 8.44pm AEST, Fastly reported it had identified the issue and a fix was being implemented.

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Users had reported receiving "Error 503 Service Unavailable" pages when attempting to log on to a number of websites.

Others received a "fastly error" saying the domain of a significant website such as the BBC was "unknown".

The outage also impacted a number of Australian websites, including 9Now, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Fastly is one of four companies that provide CDN (Content Delivery Network) services to some of the internet's biggest sites.

Because of the nature of CDNs, which involve servers located in multiple locations, not every website that was impacted came back online immediately.

Fastly said it had identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions, meaning the outage appeared to be caused internally.

Brief internet service outages are not uncommon and are only rarely the result of hacking or other mischief.

Still, major futures markets in the US dipped sharply minutes after the outage, which came in wake of cyberattacks hitting Nine, the publisher of this website, and major meat processor JBS, whose operations were impacted in Australia and the US.

Some of the websites hit by major web outage

• 9Now
• Reddit
• SMH
• CNN
• Age
• Gov.uk
• NY Times
• Twitch
• Pinterest
• The Guardian
• AFR
• BBC
• Financial Times

What is Fastly?

Fastly describes itself as an "edge cloud platform." It provides vital behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web's high-profile sites, by helping them to store, or "cache," content in servers around the world so that it's closer to users.

The company says its services mean a European user going to an American website can get the content 200 to 500 milliseconds faster.

"It is serious because Fastly is one of the world's biggest CDNs and this was a global outage," said Doug Madory, an internet infrastructure expert at Kentik.

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Fastly stock jumped more than 6 per cent after the outage as investors shrugged off the problem.

The impact highlights the relative fragility of the internet's architecture given its heavy reliance on big tech companies — such as Amazon's AWS cloud services — as opposed to a more decentralised array of companies.

"Even the biggest and most sophisticated companies experience outages. But they can also recover fairly quickly," Mr Madory said.

- wIth Associated Press